How social media saved one neighborhood devastated by Harvey

Homes just east of Beltway 8 are inundated with water from the overflowing Buffalo Bayou north of Briar Forest Drive on Sept. 2 in Houston. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner issued a mandatory evacuation order that day for residents in homes within certain areas with water in them. less

Homes just east of Beltway 8 are inundated with water from the overflowing Buffalo Bayou north of Briar Forest Drive on Sept. 2 in Houston. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner issued a mandatory evacuation order ... more

Laura Spaulding holds her daughter Lacey Spaulding while standing in the water left by Hurricane Harvey.

Laura Spaulding holds her daughter Lacey Spaulding while standing in the water left by Hurricane Harvey.

Photo: Courtesy Of Laura Spaulding /

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This is a sign at a house on the corner to help people get connected with resources in the neighborhood, including the Facebook group.

This is a sign at a house on the corner to help people get connected with resources in the neighborhood, including the Facebook group.

Photo: Courtesy Of Kim Ehlinger /

How social media saved one neighborhood devastated by Harvey

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Julie Leach sat on her wooden staircase Aug. 27 at around 4 a.m. as she watched the water rise in the first floor of her home in Houston.

At first, she thought it would be all right, though her family might be trapped for a day or two in their home in the West Houston neighborhood of Nottingham Forest. They had a case of water, a few bananas and a pack of Cuties, she said laughing.

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“Flood brain is a weird thing,” where denial figures prominently, she said. Her 22-year-old son, Bobby, moved some furniture upstairs, and put others on wooden blocks.

But when she saw a friend post on a neighborhood Facebook group later that morning about needing rescue from their home, it finally clicked — it was time to go. She texted the neighbor to see what boat she had left on, and found her family’s escape.

The Leach family wasn’t the only one that used Facebook, Twitter or other social media for critical information as they made the heart-wrenching decision to evacuate or wait out the 51.9 inches of rain Harvey dumped on some areas of Houston.

In Nottingham Forest, where I grew up, social media became a lifeline for family friends like the Leaches as Julie and others used it to stay abreast of flooding and find a way to escape to drier ground. And even today, social media is helping the neighborhood stay connected as they coordinate supplies for neighbors, and prepare to rebuild.

“It really did save us,” Julie said of social media. “When I saw Darlynn had a boat and was getting out, I was like oh, that’s when it clicked. Otherwise you just aren’t thinking clearly — you’re just kind of stunned. I’m like, well we’ve got bananas and water.”

Beyond finding a boat, Julie was also worried about the power, which she had left on in her home as it began to flood.

“I posted on Facebook I’m not sure how to get out, I’m afraid that the water is going to electrocute me, so people started calling me, texting me, posting back to me on Facebook,” Julie said. “And then I saw Darlynn talk about being rescued by a boat and so I thought, maybe I should go ahead and do that … Somehow I got some sense in my self and said: We need to get the heck out of here.”

Two boats arrived within 45 minutes of her texting Darlynn. One took Julie and her dogs, and another took her children, Julie said. She says didn’t even know at the time the people who rescued them.

She followed the storm’s progress in her neighborhood, and saw Darlynn Lydick’s post, on the NF/AF Houston Facebook page that was originally started by Ann Barry more than a year ago as a group for neighbors in Nottingham Forest and Ashford Forest.

The page quickly became a nerve center for rescue and food delivery during the storm.

“It’s already a disaster, but had there not been social media like there is, it would have been way worse,” Barry said in an interview. While rain flooded Houston homes, the group was inundated with addresses requesting rescues and with offers to help.

Armed with a canoe his wife gave him for Father’s Day a few years back, Don Paullo guesses he rescued at least 100 of his neighbors, as well as pets and belongings from flooded homes in the neighborhood. His was one of two boats that rescued Julie Leach, she later learned.

He said he almost always went out with another adult in the canoe to help too.

“I’m sure there were hundreds of people that our neighborhood helped out of their homes,” he said.

Paullo’s own took on 6 to 8 inches of water, he said.

“I’ve certainly done a lot of crying in the past week, but it’s more about the generosity of my friends and neighbors than what I’ve lost,” Paullo said on Sept. 1.

People started going out Aug. 27, the Sunday after Harvey hit Texas, to pull people from their homes, Nottingham Forest resident Georgia Polley said in an interview. Her husband also made rescues with a Jon Boat with a trolling motor.

Once people realized Don Paullo was making rescues, his wife Brandi helped coordinate the addresses of people to rescue from Facebook as well as from the deluge of texts and calls she received. As more people and their boats joined in, other neighbors opened a “command center” in a neighbor’s garage to coordinate rescues, Don and Brandi said.

“Our command center was people standing in the garage in the rain with a phone and people would call out addresses as soon as you saw one pop up on our neighborhood Facebook page,” Polley said. “But then you would get (text messages) because people knew that my husband was in the water, people knew that Don was in the water, people knew that my neighbor was in the water.”

Ian Craig started collecting addresses on notepads by Monday: “Get location and assign assets” as he explained it in a Facebook message to me. He directed a canoe, for example, to easier rescues and an airboat to the more difficult ones.

Craig, a former Navy intelligence officer, said he treated it “like that kind of operation.” They used texts to coordinate the boats to the addresses, he said. He said he signed off after everyone on his list was accounted for.

Polley spent some time standing in the garage, too, texting her husband addresses of rescues until the garage started taking on water too, she said.

Neighbors spent at least two days pulling people out of houses before professionals arrived, Polley said.

“Social media saved people,” Polley said. “There’s no way we would’ve known the 80-year-old couple in their second story, had there not been Facebook for everybody to connect.”

As water rose in Laura Spaulding’s home on Aug. 27, she got online and saw many streets in the neighborhood were already underwater. A canoe came by her home and asked if they needed help, but she knew that wouldn’t work for her 83-year-old father-in-law who just suffered a stroke three weeks before and had trouble even getting up the stairs. She also had eight children in her home at the time, since another family was staying with them.

Then she saw a post on the NFMomversations Facebook group for the Nottingham Forest Moms’ Club that said “will be able to get elderly,” and she jumped on the chance.

Spaulding commented on the post, “we need a boat — father in law can barely walk.” Other neighbors chimed in with directions to her house while Spaulding helped her family pack and put prized possessions up high in closets just in case.

Several boats eventually got the entire crew out, she said.

“These men came and walked through chest high water in our house,” Spaulding said. “My husband and another man literally picked up and cradled my father-in-law and carried him through the water, and then got him in a boat. And then I’m holding his medical equipment behind him, and we all kind of got in and at that point we’re kind of laying in this boat on top of each other …

But at that point we’re just so thankful to get out of there,” she said.

Her father-in-law laid against Spaulding and her husband in a long, sturdy raft that was dragged by people wading next to it for several blocks until they could get out and walk.

Other neighbors on drier land, in the meantime, also used Facebook to coordinate feeding everyone who needed a plate.

“We have different neighborhood pages, within the neighborhood, and she just posted on all of them saying, we’re going to feed people,” Amanda Candler said of her sister-in-law who helped organize the cooking. “We have all this food. Bring food to us we will cook it, we will make it, we will feed people. And so we just started collecting.”

They started making food two days after Harvey made landfall, she said, serving an estimated 40 to 50 people that night, she said.

“My brother, he has a smoker and grills, and he just popped up a tent to be able to stand under the rain,” she said. “People just brought us all this meat and stuff from their freezers, a lot of people had to empty their freezers and stuff because they were losing power.”

The group had five pots of chili ready to go for dinner the next day and were planning to fry fish that Tuesday from people’s freezers.

“Hi sweet people! Tonight will be our last shift as command center,” Katy Preisler, her sister-in-law, posted in the NF/AF Houston group on Aug. 29. “There will be a ton of food available tonight beyond just fish. Michael and I are cooking EVERYTHING and what isn’t eaten tonight is being taken to Christ Memorial. We will be bidding farewell tomorrow.”

Since then, others in the neighborhood posted in Barry’s group about when and where other food options were available, like the Salvation Army’s food truck. Others have been prompting neighbors to visit houses where free items are available, such as the neighborhood store for free cleaning supplies, or the free “grocery store.”

“It just connects everybody in the neighborhood and it’s been amazing,” Candler said of social media. “I just actually said to my husband last night, look you know a lot of things can be said about social media but it’s been incredible this time, because it’s such an easy way to hit everybody.”

There’s no other way to get information out “to people you otherwise wouldn’t be connected to, you know you don’t have everyone’s phone number. You just don’t. Everything’s been done through Facebook,” she said.

Facebook, really, is the staging ground for Nottingham Forest efforts to rebuild. An Amazon wish list for the neighborhood, for example, is being shared all over the network to encourage people to buy things residents need.

“There’s just an amazing camaraderie that they have now because of this,” Paullo said of Nottingham Forest residents.